Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Admirable Friendship… It becomes a support on the path so that you can develop appropriate attention. When things are not going well, you don’t say that it’s because of this thing out there or that person out there. “It’s because of something happening in the mind. There’s something I’m not doing quite right.” This is how the Buddha himself gained awakening …
- A Wealthy Memory… How are you going to learn to become a noble disciple? Where do the nobles disciples come from? They came from unawakened people, but they learn to adopt these attitudes. That was part of what made them noble. So if you’re in a particular situation, ask yourself: What would Ajaan Suwat say? What would Ajaan Fuang say? What would the Buddha say? Try …
- Patience… It’s typical, when you go to Thailand, that some people will ask you, “How can you stand this? You come from a comfortable place, there are all these hardships here.” Well, if you don’t think of them as hardships, then they don’t become hardships. Focus more on the opportunities you’ve got to practice. It’s the same with practicing the …
- Mindful & Discerning 24/7… When the practice becomes an all-day, all-mind affair like this, that’s when it begins to have an effect.
- Values… What am I becoming right now?” Hopefully not -just becoming an older person. Hopefully doing something with this in-and-out breath to gain some deeper understanding as to why there is suffering, and what can be done to stop it. And realizing that finding an answer to that question is one of the most important things you can do. In the process of …
- A Unified Committee… There’s a nerve that leads out to every pore, there’s a blood vessel that goes out there, so all the nerve endings that are sending messages are supposed to become part of a one big whole—which is not the way they normally function. Often you focus on this part, then you focus on that part, whichever parts seems to have a …
- What Should I Do?… The sense of ease and well-being that you gain from being right here can provide you with nourishment, can strengthen you, so that as you meditate, you’re being responsible, both in creating a refuge for yourself and becoming someone the people around you can depend on, too. We live in a very undependable world, and trained people are few and far between …
- Conviction & Truth… Part of this requires that if you’re going to become someone who can pass judgment on the teachings, you have to be the kind of person whose judgment is reliable. This is one of the reasons why we practice meditation, so that we can make our judgment more reliable, make our gaze steadier, and our sense of what’s really a defilement in …
- A Pure Happiness… What that means is that our mind’s become purer, not simply through pursuing happiness but also questioning what we’re doing, questioning the results. It’s the questioning that allows for the purifying process. But it doesn’t have to be a process of self-torture. It’s just developing a more and more refined sense of what true happiness is, what the …
- A Gift of Well-Being… This inner fabrication then becomes a foundation for the way you act in the world outside as well. It’s a benefit that spreads from right here and radiates out in all directions. This is why it’s important that you maintain your center right here as much as you can, not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but also …
- What to Keep in Mind… That way, your sense of how to maintain your balance will become more and more intuitive.
- Treasures Beyond Death… The Buddhist way is to learn how to become heedful, and to be heedful is something very auspicious. As the Buddha said, it’s one of the blessings of life is to be heedful: to realize on the one hand that there is aging, illness, and death in life, there’s separation in life: this happens to us, it happens to all people, all …
- The First Noble Truth… Because the big problem of the suffering is that you’re often in it, in what the Buddha calls becoming. You’ve taken on an identity in a particular world and it’s causing you suffering. As long as you’re thinking of yourself as, “I’m this person in this world in this situation that’s causing suffering,” it’s going to weigh …
- Keep Things Simple… So if we keep things simple, the meditation becomes a lot more manageable. And it’s this simple sort of questioning that helps see through the mind’s subterfuges. The mind sometimes has a tendency to get more and more abstract and to want to deal with really fancy-sounding thoughts. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes. The person who’s willing …
- Where You Set Your Heart… the flood of sensuality, the flood of becoming, the flood of views, the flood of ignorance. ** So you’re very definitely making a choice: Where are you going to go? Where are you going to look for safety? There’s a great conversation where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha. Pasenadi is usually presented as something of a naïf who, after having gained …
- On Your Own… That’s the group you want to identify with so that you can show true love for yourself at the same time you find the excellence of the Dhamma in yourself and become an example to others. In this way, all three governing principles come together. So try to keep these three governing principles in mind, because there’s nobody else out there who …
- Take Care… If you put the two together, then everything that’s a part of your life here at the monastery becomes a part of the practice, a part of the development of the mind. I noticed that Ajaan Fuang’s best lay student meditators were the ones who took everything in their lives as a lesson for the practice. Living here at the monastery the …
- Little Things… It sustains itself and becomes a source of strength for the mind. In that way, it sustains you. You want to apply this same attention to detail to all aspects of your life — not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed but also when you’re dealing with other people, doing work out in the orchard or at the guesthouse, whatever …
- Sensitivity All the Time… It will keep developing, becoming an ability to read things more and more carefully, more and more precisely, so that you won’t have to memorize insights from the past. It will keep serving them up, hot and fresh. Like sailing a boat: When you first get out in the boat and they give you the rudder, it doesn’t take long before you …
- Contentment… Once you have that sense of direction, the internal path becomes a lot clearer. That’s where you have to be very, very scrupulous, and not allow the states that pull you back to take over. There’s one other element, though, that the Buddha said not to tolerate, and that’s if you find yourself hanging out with people who pull you off …
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